… understanding what this President has done is institute the very toughest ethics and transparency rules of any administration in history… I think the President has returned to a stance of transparency and ethics that hasn’t been matched by any other White House.

… the President believes strongly in transparency… that transparency in that way in the best policy

… understand that what the President campaigned on – toughening our ethics rules, making more transparent our transparency policy – was something that he was passionate about and is proud of the progress that we’ve made in ensuring that.

And here is the president himself: “We have put in place the toughest ethics and transparency laws of any administration in history.”

Lies, lies, and nothing but lies. The lies end now.

As reported moments ago, the White House is voiding a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA (incidentally the same act that discovered none of Hillary Clinton’s “personal” government-business emails since they were not even stored on government property!) which as USA Today explains, makes “official a policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to reject requests for records to that office.” Continue reading »

“There are gaps of months and months and months,” exclaims Rep. Trey Gowdy (who leads the committee investigating Hillary Clinton’s handling of the Benghazi attack in September 2012) as the ‘transparent’ release of Clinton’s email includes no emails at all from a seemingly critical Tripoli visit (where she has been photographed using her Blackberry). Gowdy ranted on CBS “Face The Nation” yesterday that “it strains credibility to believe if you’re on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy that there is not a single document to turn over to Congress.” Clinton, for now, is staying very quiet on this matter… Continue reading »

While the Hillary Clinton campaign seems unperturbed by recent problematic disclosures by Politico into the Hillary Clinton Foundation, the former first lady and current democrat presidential hopeful will have a field day explaining why, as the NYT reported overnight, Hillary – in her role as Secretary of State – “exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business” according to State Department officials in violation of “federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.”

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

Why is this a deeply troubling breach of protocol, not to say a substantial threat to national security by America’s former top diplomat? For starter, using Hotmail or Aol instead of a protected, encrypted government address leaves little to the hacker’s imagination. But what’s worse is that as a result of exclusive reliance on non-government platforms, which have no document retention policy and in fact have a “straight to trash” policy, any and all emails regarding the Benghazi scandal, many of which were FOIAed, could have been and were simply deleted without ever leaving a trace. Or as NSA Nate summarized:

In case you missed it…

Mel here. I thought I’d do a quick report to remind myself that there are other things going on in the world right now besides Ebola.

Things like these psychopaths in charge gleefully stoking the cold war (guess that’d be called a warm war at the moment); or the fact that former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta is now claiming the war with ISIS is set to last THIRTY YEARS; and now, just a few days ago, a federal appeals court denied a fresh FOIA request regarding the 1996 TWA flight 800 “incident” off the coast of Long Island, New York…you know, in the interest of “national security”.

Well back in July while CNN’s Anderson Cooper was covering the flight MH17 “incident,” he accidentally blurted out that flight 800 was “shot down,” (what, by a surface-​to-​air missile perhaps?) before he corrected himself at the next possible opportunity after the next commercial break with the official government story. Continue reading »

“We have put in place the toughest ethics and transparency laws of any administration in history,” President Obama proclaimed four short years ago… However, as AP Washington Bureau Chief Sally Buzbee said recently, the fight for access to public information has never been harder, and in fact, the problem extends across the entire federal government and is now trickling down to state and local governments. Here is Buzbee’s list of eight ways Obama’s “most transparent” administration is making it hard for journalists to find information and cover the news…

National security reporter emailed drafts to agency for more government-friendly revisions

A former Los Angeles Times national security journalist routinely sent drafts of his articles to CIA press handlers for input and revision, the Interceptrevealed on Friday.

Email exchanges between Ken Dilanian and public relations officers at the agency were discovered after the Intercept sent a FOIA request to the CIA over its relationship with reporters. In many of the emails, Dilanian promised to provide the agency with positive coverage, often going so far as to change entire drafts of articles based on the CIA’s replies.

The 9/11 Commission Co-Chairs – Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean – have called for the 28-page section of the 9/11 Commission Report which is classified to be declassified.

Kean said that 60-70% of what was classified shouldn’t have been classified in the first place:

Congressman Thomas Massie read the 28 classified pages of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry into 9/11 (the joint Senate and House investigation into 9/11) and immediately called for them to be released to the public: Continue reading »

The Royal Family is to be granted absolute protection from public scrutiny in a controversial legal reform designed to draw a veil of secrecy over the affairs of the Queen, Prince Charles and Prince William.

Letters, emails and documents relating to the monarch, her heir and the second in line to the throne will no longer be disclosed even if they are in the public interest. Continue reading »

His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files.

It was there that Scudder discovered a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts and operations that he concluded were still being stored in secret years after they should have been shared with the public.

To get them released, Scudder submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act — a step that any citizen can take, but one that is highly unusual for a CIA employee. Four years later, the CIA has released some of those articles and withheld others. It also has forced Scudder out.

His request set in motion a harrowing sequence. He was confronted by supervisors and accused of mishandling classified information while assembling his FOIA request. His house was raided by the FBI and his family’s computers seized. Stripped of his job and his security clearance, Scudder said he agreed to retire last year after being told that if he refused, he risked losing much of his pension. Continue reading »

Transparency activist Ryan Shapiro is suing three government agencies for failing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests he filed in an attempt to uncover details about any role the United States played in the 1962 arrest of Nelson Mandela.

Shapiro — a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a noted FOIA researcher — filed a lawsuit Monday morning in Washington, DC against the US National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Defense Intelligence Agency after his requests for details about the anti-apartheid activist were rebuked by the US government. He is already suing the Central Intelligence Agency for the same reason.

The Freedom of Information Act is not the only law the public can use to obtain records from the government. Most states have similar laws for accessing documents on the state and local levels. Here in California, EFF is using the California Public Records Act to learn what new technologies local law enforcement agencies are using and whether these technologies violate our rights.

Do you drive a car in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area? According to the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff’s Department, your car is part of a vast criminal investigation.

One upon a time everyone got a hearty chuckle when Obama declared, on the very first day of his ascension to the throne, that his administration would be the “most transparent in history.” And if they didn’t then, they certainly will now following news that it none other than Obama’s own administration – made infamous for spying on everyone who uses electronic communication courtesy of one whistleblower – that it has refused a record number of Freedom of Information (don’t laugh) requests on the basis of, drumroll, national security. So between the NSA, whose job is to ensure national security, and all those pesky meddlesome investigators, whose only curiosity is to peek behind the secrecy of the Obama administration, there should be precisely zero acts of terrorism on US soil. Like last year’s Boston bombing for example. Oh wait…

From AP:

The Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.

Tragic, heartbreaking mass murders in recent years have spread fear and panic among the general public. Yet some are questioning if there isn’t more than meets the eye to these cruel and bizarre events. Is it conceivable that there might be a deeper agenda here? This essay presents undeniable evidence that secret government mind control programs have created assassins out of unsuspecting citizens.

The astonishing excerpts below, taken verbatim from declassified CIA documents, reveal detailed mind control experiments in highly secret, government-sponsored experiments. Through hypnosis, drugs, and electric shock, CIA clinicians fractured personalities and induced multiple personality disorder (MPD) – also called dissociative identity disorder (DID). These top secret experiments were successful in creating Manchurian Candidates or super spies programmed to carry out assassination, terrorist acts, sexual favors, and more without conscious knowledge of what they were doing. The army of Manchurian Candidates created may have played a key, hidden role in world politics.

International Business Times, Dec. 11, 2013: In 2013, people were really interested in radioactive fallout from the Fukushima disaster […] Altmetric factors in both news stories and social media chatter in determining just how popular a scientific paper is. The top-scoring paper, published in the journal Scientific Reports by a pair of Japanese researchers, examined the radioactive cesium contamination of freshwater fish in the areas surrounding the Fukushima nuclear plant. Continue reading »

A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

Two workers have filed a lawsuit against the Department of Energy for failing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to hand over a video of an incident in which 16 men, including the two plaintiffs, were exposed to radiation.

Brian Simmons and Ralph Stanton, two operators from the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in Boise, are trying to force the agency to release the video through a lawsuit filed in federal court.

In their complaint, the workers described the radiation incident, which occurred on Nov. 8, 2011. Together with workers from two other facilities, Simmons and Stanton were packaging plutonium reactor fuel plates. Two of the fuel storage containers had “unusual labels” indicating that there could be some abnormalities with the fuel plates that were inside. But the labels did not warn of any danger, and when workers came across a fuel plate wrapped in plastic and tape, they unwrapped it. A black powder spilled out of the box, and at least 16 of the workers inhaled plutonium-239, which can damage internal organs and cause cancer. Seven of the employees came in direct contact with the powder, suffering external contamination of the skin.

“When the workers attempted to remove the wrapping material, an uncontrolled release of radioactive contaminants occurred, resulting in contamination of 16 workers and the facility, including plaintiffs Brian Simmons and Ralph Stanton,” the lawsuit states. “The sequence of events leading up to the release of contaminants, the uncontrolled release itself, and the emergency response at the [Zero Power Physics Reactor] facility were all recorded on video.”

In 2012, the INL announced that none of the workers suffered from any adverse health effects as a result of the incident, but they also refused to release employee-specific internal radiological dosage numbers.

But according to Seattle attorney John Sheridan, who filed a complaint with the US Department of Labor, thetwo workers suffered “symptoms of radiation poisoning including nausea, vomiting, confusion, diarrhea, and high blood pressure, which lasted for months.”

There was a smell about the Zimmerman case. We wondered why the Federalist Society, known for orchestrating the 2000 stolen election, crushing 9/11 investigations and lawsuits and acting as the primary proponents of government spying were so interested in the killing of a 17 year old in Florida.

Veterans Today has caught the GOP, Judicial Watch and the Heritage Foundation falsifying, redacting and misrepresenting government documents to rig a murder trial, to smear the Justice Department and forward a “police state” agenda.

There is no doubt that the fraud exposed below, one intended to foment racial strife and and violence was also intended to rig the Zimmerman trial to ensure a “not guilty” verdict.